Studio Roosegaarde Honored as LIT 2017 Lighting Designer of the Year for Waterlicht

Studio Roosegaarde Honored as LIT 2017 Lighting Designer of the Year for Waterlicht

LIT Design Awards Announces the Winners of its 1st Annual International Competition for Lighting Product Design and Implementation.

By Ellen Hemming

ROOSEGAARDE WINS LIT

Dutch artist and innovator Daan Roosegaarde explores the relationship between people, technology and space to create Waterlicht, a virtual flood which shows the power of water.

The LIT Design Awards was created to recognize the efforts of talented international lighting product designers and lighting implementers on both professional and student-focused levels. The Farmani Group assembled LIT to bring attention to achievements in lighting and to promote the winning designers and implementers to the prominent audience worldwide. The jury of 14 expert panelists was rich in design-minded professionals across the board of the lighting industry. John Cullen Lighting CEO Peter van der Kolk, Head of Lighting for CannonDesign Sara Schonour, Broadway lighting designer and Academic Director of NYU Tisch ML Geiger, and Edwin Sargeant Director of XERO Lighting Group are all jurors who worked together to select the LIT Winners.

Daan Roosegaarde began his career as an innovator after graduating from The Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and founded Studio Roosegaarde in 2007, where he works with his team of designers and engineers toward a better future. Waterlicht is a powerful and poetic experience created to remind us of the role and importance of innovation. When informed of the Jury’s decision, Daan responded, “It is an honour to receive the LIT Designer of the Year Award with Waterlicht, recognising the importance of public light installations with an environmental message to move and activate people.”

The LIT Lighting Product Design of the Year is FLYTE: The Levitating Light, a product designed by Simon Morris which hovers by magnetic levitation and is powered through the air. Merging the words fly, light, and the Swedish word for float, Flyte creates luminous spectacles that combine the wonders of magnetic levitation with wireless power. Simon is a product designer who experiments with sound, matter and energy in relation to gravity to develop as he calls his “floating things in space” that captivate our imaginations.

LIT also announces the LIT Emerging Lighting Designer and Lighting Product Design of 2017, with cash prize scholarships to encourage each designer’s next project in lighting design. The recipient of the LIT 2017 Emerging Lighting Designer of the Year is Massimiliano Moro who’s design for Monstera Deliciosa was a site-specific project made for a large abandoned palace Palazzo di Napoli, in the hearth of Palermo. This design fills the abandoned space with life using light sculptures of autochthone plants as objects. Massimiliano is a young artist in Barcelona specializing in light art projects and sculptures with light, shadows, and colors.

Anna Tomschik is the final LIT Honoree of 2017, winning the Lighting Product Design of the Year for HENYX, a lamp inspired by the sun and moon. HENYX is a luminaire with two facets balancing light and darkness. In the morning, the lamp elicits neurohormonal changes in the body that are typical when waking up, and in the evening, the moon module has a soft reflective light prompting the viewer into a dreamscape. With its accompanying mobile app HENYX connects to an alarm clock for individualized settings and creates one’s own lighting universe.